Wikipedia:WikiProject edit counters/Internationalization

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There are several issues that need to be dealt with when designing an edit counter to work on other MediaWikis, especially on those in other languages.

Contents 1 General issues 1.1 Enumerating all servers 1.2 Testing 2 Query.php 3 HTML scrapers

[edit] General issues

[edit] Enumerating all servers

• m:Special:SiteMatrix lists all Wikimedia wikis
  • ~interiot/wiki_list, the list that toolserver projects use internally
• m:Sites using MediaWiki lists outside MediaWikis that may be running different versions of MediaWiki. Non-toolserver tools may be able to work with these.

[edit] Testing

• This is a page that 1) lists servers by number of articles, and 2) lists admins on those servers, in order of account creation, some of whom likely have a high number of edits. It's largely intended to be used for testing of edit counters, especially on international servers. (this certainly isn't the only way to find candidates for edit-count testing, it's just one that seemed easier to me)

[edit] Query.php

This new method is much easier than scraping HTML. It should be installed on all WikiMedia servers, but may not be installed on all third-party MediaWiki servers.

• To get a list of namespaces, use query.php?what=namespaces
• To get a user's contributions, use query.php?what=usercontribs&titles=User:YurikBot&uclimit=20&uccomments

[edit] HTML scrapers

Dates and (next 50) links can be difficult to parse across different languages. The easiest way to resolve this is to call Special:Contributions with &uselang=en, which will present the dates and links in a uniform format. (for example)